Buildings and factories consume energy in large quantities. Energy consumption of private-sector businesses is especially as large as 20% of the total. Effective energy-saving measures are required. Also, tight power supply and demand in recent years impose an upper limit of power consumption on large consumers. Hence, energy-saving technologies such as an energy consumption peak cut technique and peak shift technique have received considerable attention.
It is hoped that new energy systems such as a photovoltaic (PV) system, wind generator system, and solar heat utilization system will become popular more and more in the future. Energy storage systems such as storage batteries and accumulators, which are required to effectively utilize these energy creation systems of this type, have also received a lot of attention.
In order to effectively use energy, it is desired to control diversifying energy related systems to cooperate with each other. To this end, it is important to create an operation schedule required to organically activate an energy consumption system, energy creation system, and energy storage system. The operation schedule created by the existing method aims at energy or cost savings in a building or facility alone such as a building or factory.
A technique called demand response (DR), with which an energy supplier requires a consumer to suppress energy consumption is known. When a building or factory receives a demand response signal, it is required to change an energy-saving target value and power-saving target value, and to also change an operation schedule.
However, it is difficult to immediately change the operation schedule in response to reception of the demand response signal. One to two hours are often required for calculations required to create an operation schedule. For this reason, hours enough to determine the advisability of the created operation schedule or to complete required settings cannot be assured before execution of the operation schedule, and it is difficult to activate respective systems under an advantageous scenario.
Furthermore, it is often revealed in the middle of an operation schedule calculation process that energy cost can be further reduced by storing energy in a heat storage tank or storage battery in advance. However, as creation of the operation schedule takes longer, a time required to store energy in advance becomes shorter. Especially, since energy related systems (heat storage device, chiller, etc.) normally rise slowly, it becomes more disadvantageous as schedule creation takes longer.
As described above, with the existing technique, it is often focused to execute disadvantageous operations upon reception of the demand response signal. A technique which can solve such problems is demanded.